


Monogamy of Entanglement

by gin_eater



Series: M-∑ Relation [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Adultery, F/M, Hotel Sex, Moira Brings the Biotic Molly, One Night Stands, Poorly Improvised Scientific Jargon, Pre-Canon, Socially Awkward Siebren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-13 13:58:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21495427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: "The Monogamy of Entanglement is the statement that 'maximally entangled' particles only show up in pairs.  Entanglement is a sliding scale, so things can be non-entangled or a little entangled, but when the quantum states of two things are completely tied up in each other, there’s just no room for a third."Before Blackwatch, before Talon, before the Melody, Moira and Siebren are drawn into one another's orbit on the last day of a weekend science symposium.
Relationships: Moira O'Deorain/Sigma | Siebren de Kuiper
Series: M-∑ Relation [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579798
Comments: 30
Kudos: 89





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If I have Overwatch's timeline right (which I doubt I do, but feck it), this takes place approximately a decade before current canon events, in the interim between Moira's and Siebren's respective professional catastrophes.
> 
> The quote in the summary is from The Physicist at askamathematician dot com, who provided the most usefully romantic definition of the statement.

Like Moira herself, Dr. Siebren de Kuiper is difficult to miss. Standing well over two meters tall in balmorals, with broad shoulders, severe eyebrows, and a thin, angular face that wouldn't look out of place on an animated villain, he cuts an imposing figure wherever he goes, even hunched over a hotel bar as he is now, scowling down at his mobile where it rests on the varnished oak in front of him.

Like Moira herself, he has a reputation for eccentricity, which isn't unexpected, eccentricity being practically its own amino acid in the STEM fields: foundational for, if not one's survival, then absolutely one's ingenuity, and thus one's acclaim -- or infamy, as the case may be. 

Therein do he and Moira differ.

She is here to dilute what scant emotional disturbances her formidable reserves of arrogance and spite cannot metabolize in as much triple-distilled single malt whiskey as she can stomach, having spent the majority of the last two days wading through the scornful whispers of her so-called peers. It's the first symposium she's attended since her research was excoriated by the rabidly sanctimonious fingers of the ethically inclined, and as such, her very presence here both titillates and offends, like Eve come back to Eden with a cheeky wink and an apple pie in hand.

Dr. de Kuiper, on the other hand, still enjoys the fruits of his labors, having within the past few months acquired a slice of grant money large enough to launch both himself and a… What's the collective noun for a grouping of postdocs?

A pedantry, she decides -- funds enough to launch himself and a _pedantry_ of associated postdocs into orbit. Astrophysics not being Moira's chosen area of academic focus, she's only superficially familiar with the proposal that has garnered him the privilege -- something about the black hole information paradox and devising a way to skip figurative stones across the surface of an event horizon, in order to read what the ripples reflect about what, if anything, may be written on the other side. If he is successful, the results of his experiments could well bring about the most significant cosmological paradigm shift since Copernicus centered the sun.

That said, he hardly looks like a man walking the Planck toward a discovery that could redefine the definitions of reality itself, especially in light of what she's heard about his borderline fanatical devotion to his work; indeed, he looks as miserable as she staunchly refuses to. Moira's grasp of empathy is largely hypothetical, but she's a decent reader of faces, and if she had to make a conjecture, she would identify his expression as one of grief and -- her interest piques -- resentment.

Old adages about misery and company fall together in her head, and she takes a seat at the bar, leaving one stool between them.

The omnic bartender attends her at once, setting out glass and ice, and leaving the bottle as requested. Moira watches Dr. de Kuiper register her presence on his periphery, his pale eyes subtly tracking the movements of her hands as she pours. While her height and her eyes are certainly the most striking aspects of her appearance, Moira privately considers her hands to be her finest feature, agile and elegantly formed, with well-shaped nails and a steadiness that could put a neurosurgeon to shame.

Dr. de Kuiper doesn't otherwise acknowledge her, which is fine -- if scientific advancement was overly reliant on interpersonal skills, humanity never would have progressed past bone clubs and campfires. Moira herself typically avoids mindless chatter like the plague, but in her case, it's a matter of preference, not a lack of ability. 

De Kuiper's reluctance to engage gives her an opportunity to steal a glance at his phone screen, where a text message some two paragraphs long sits somberly in night mode.

"Bad news?" she ventures, and he startles at her voice.

"What?" he asks, head turning to look not at her, but at the bottle of whiskey in front of her on the bar.

She nods at his phone. "A message that long is either an amusing anecdote or a regretful explanation, and you're not smiling."

"Yes," he says, and then, "--No. My, er… It's...it's nothing."

He powers off the screen.

"Tell me," she prompts.

He does look at her this time -- well, sort of: a quick darting of his eyes across her face, as if to make sure she has one.

"Why?" he asks, sounding more bewildered by her interest than suspicious of it, and Moira shrugs, swirling her drink in her glass, listening to the ice chime against the sides. 

"Why not?"

"I don't know you."

It's an ideal opening, and she slips smoothly through the gap in the seal to face him fully, holding out her hand to introduce herself, "Doctor Moira O'Deorain."

He hesitates slightly, but adheres to the social protocol. "Doctor Siebren de Kuiper."

His hand is smooth but strong, with the broad, meaty palm of a pianist and cool, dry skin. Moira catches the slight flaring of his nostrils at the touch, the quick bob of his Adam's apple above his shirt collar as he swallows, but she can't tell if it's an attraction response or simply nervous recognition of her name.

"O'Deorain," he repeats. "You wrote the methodology on human somatic gene modification."

"Guilty, as charged." She braces herself for the judgmental lour that these days almost always follows the revelation of her identity, but Dr. de Kuiper's expression remains gratifyingly neutral.

"I read it," he admits. "--Granted, mostly to see what all the fuss was about. I'm no geneticist, but I found the techniques you described fascinating. Truly innovative."

A short, bitter laugh escapes her. "Tell that to the moralists watching over the world."

He waves as if to brush the very notion of said moralists aside. "Newton's third law."

"Says the man whose research has been met with near-universal acclaim."

"Oh, they'll come for me eventually, I'm sure. Those on high horses always believe they can see farther down a divergent path than those actually making the strides to walk it."

Moira smiles, and color floods de Kuiper's cheeks when he glances over at her and catches it.

Attraction, then. Good. She likes him, too.

His gaze once again finds the dark screen of his phone. "My, er…my wife has given me an ultimatum," he explains. "I'm scheduled to leave in September for ten months aboard the International Space Station, and I have been informed that she will not be there to greet me when I land again. Thirty years of marriage, and just as I am about to reach the pinnacle of my life's work, she wants me to climb back down the mountain." He shakes his head, bemused -- _appalled._

With that, at least, Moira can well sympathize.

"Which will you choose?" she asks him.

He's silent at that, and it's is all the answer she requires.

"Good," she says, and he looks briefly in her general direction, his dark eyebrows raised in surprise. She shrugs and explains, "Obviously you can't stay. You climb down the mountain, and for what? A few months, at best, of strained civility, until your mutual disappointment in one another erupts into outright contempt, and your marriage is over regardless. An ultimatum like that to a man of your gifts and drive offers nothing more than the illusion of a choice. She's already made her decision; what she needs is for it to be your fault."

Dr. de Kuiper blinks, momentarily taken aback by her candor.

"...Perhaps you should change specialities, Doctor O'Deorain. You would make an excellent psychiatrist."

Moira rolls her eyes. "Please. You needn't pile onto the insults this weekend has already thrust upon me."

He smiles. "My apologies. I meant only that you seem to be an uncommonly insightful person. And you're very easy to talk to."

"Well, that's a first. Most people find me a bit of a nightmare conversationalist -- quite literally, people have had nightmares following the conversations they've had with me."

De Kuiper chuckles. "I can't imagine any dreams involving you could be that harrowing."

Moira studies at him for a long moment, head tilted, turning the implications of his compliment over in her mind. She calculates the risk, and takes it: "2617."

"I beg your pardon?" he asks.

"The number of my room here. 2617."

He opens his mouth, looking so genuinely shocked at her forwardness that she wonders for a split second if she's misread him -- but no; more likely, he's misread himself. The existence and state of his marriage notwithstanding, he's not habitually flirtatious, let alone accustomed to such mild overtures being so readily and completely accepted; he needs space to process this unforeseen phenomenon, time and space, and so Moira slides off her stool before he can respond, leaving her glass at the bar but taking the bottle of whiskey with her.

She can feel his eyes burning into her back all the way to the elevator bank, and wets her lips in anticipation.

Time and space. Astrophysicist or not, she hopes he doesn't take too much of either.

* * *

The knock comes some fifteen minutes later, and she answers the door in the same clothes she was wearing downstairs, minus her jacket, shoes and socks. She finds him standing stiffly in the hall, cheeks ablaze, almost boyishly shamefaced. It's endearing in a man of his stature, both professional and physical -- it's not often Moira finds herself looking up at anyone, and it never fails to be a novel experience, especially in this context. Dr. de Kuiper is nearly a full head taller than she, and looks to be at least thirty kilos heavier. Moira is about as far from being a gender essentialist as one can get, but something deep in her belly pulses primally in response to the sheer mass of this man, the way he fills the doorway immediately suggestive of how well he may occupy more intimate places.

"Doctor de Kuiper," she greets him with a smile. "Please, come in."

He does, reflexively ducking his head to the side to avoid the lintel.

"I think," he says when the door is closed and locked behind him, "in light of current circumstances, you should call me Siebren."

"With pleasure," she says, delighting as his blush deepens a shade pinker. "As long as you return the favor, and call me Moira."

"Moira," he mouths, as if a test of its shape is required before the addition of sound.

"Would you care for a drink?"

"No, thank you. I…"

She pours one for herself while she waits for him to complete the sentence, but he stays quiet, practically radiating uncertainty. He really is out of his element, she thinks; probably adrift somewhere between nitrogen and lithium.

Moira takes a thoughtful sip of her drink, and then sets down her glass and comes to stand before him. He smells wonderful -- a little like the gin he was imbibing before, and some cleanly aquatic cologne.

Siebren inhales shakily at the nearness of her, and his eyes shift from the floor to the dresser to, finally, her face, and they blink in surprise.

"Complete heterochromia," he says, looking in amazement from her blue eye to her red one and back again.

Moira smiles. "You've only just noticed?"

"Yes. --Er, sorry. I don't-- That is, I'm…bad with faces," he stammers.

"It's fine," she assures him, and, remembering his preoccupation with her hands, reaches up to loosen his tie and undo the first two buttons of his shirt before stroking his cheek with the backs of her fingers. He tenses, but doesn't pull away. "How long has it been?" she asks, running the pad of her thumb along one sharp cheekbone.

Siebren huffs an embarrassed laugh, looking somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling as he confesses, "Long enough." Then, seeming to collect himself, he brings his gaze deliberately back down to hers. "They're beautiful," he says. "Your eyes."

Moira stretches slowly up on her toes, and then gently -- oh, so gently -- moves her hand around to cup the back of his head, and coaxes his mouth down to hers.

The kiss is soft at first, tentative. She listens as he breathes her in, and when her free hand comes to rest on the lapel of his suit jacket, she can feel an actual shudder spark and stutter its way through his body.

_Wonderful,_ she thinks. She does so adore an unreservedly respondent partner; they always carry about them the heady aura of a willing captive.

Again and again, she kisses him, each time persuading his lips to open to hers just a little bit more, until the tip of her tongue sweeps once against his, twice, and by the time his hands finally move to settle on her waist, he's thoroughly exploring her mouth of his own accord. For all his initial diffidence, he's good at it -- a quick study, mirroring both her movements and the unhurried intensity with which she makes them.

She pushes his jacket off his shoulders, and is pleasantly surprised at the well-developed trapezius muscles that contract beneath her hands when he rids himself of the garment the rest of the way. He's better built than she anticipated, far beyond what a few months of flight training would produce -- a lifelong swimmer, she surmises as her hands trace the streamlined silhouette of his torso: broad but sleek, almost exaggeratedly masculine. And as for his masculinity itself…

A startled moan escapes him as she palms him through his trousers, and Moira is delighted to find that there, as well, he's perfectly in proportion with the rest of his frame, already fully erect and throbbing from her kisses alone. It would be best, she decides, to get this first one out of the way before they proceed in earnest.

"Moira…" he shakily gasps as she kneads him through the layers of thin cotton and heavy wool.

"Hmm?" Moira's expression is all innocence as she gives his glans a squeeze, and Siebren expels a sharp breath, encircling her wrist with one big hand to stop her, even as his hips fight to grind into the delicious pressure of her hand.

"Not yet," he pleads, "I'm too… I won't be able to--"

"Shhh," she hushes him, kissing the side of his neck. "I want you to."

He pulls back to look at her, and Moira finds the mix of desperation and confusion in his face unspeakably erotic, intoxicating in its poignancy.

"You want…?"

Siebren's grip on her wrist tightens as she squeezes him again, but it's reflex, not refusal.

"I want," Moira assures him, raking the nails of her right hand through his closely-cropped hair and down along the shell of his ear as the fingers of her left resume their rhythmic ministrations. "It's all right, darling. Just let me take care of you."

"God," he whispers, swallowing audibly, "God…"

His eyes flutter shut and his head drops against her shoulder, his breaths bursting harsh and uneven against her collarbone as he struggles to keep himself together. He releases her wrist in favor of grasping her buttocks, while his other hand clutches at the yoke of her shirt, pulling her closer, impossibly close, until he's rutting against her stomach as much as her hand. She cups the back of his head and suckles at his earlobe and the sensitive pulse point pounding just below his jaw, murmuring a steady stream of encouragements in his ear, "That's it, yes, just let go, you're so close, I can feel it, show me how good I make you feel…"

He's tense as an overwrought piano wire, practically thrumming with need. Moira scratches at his scalp, slides her other hand further down his shaft, and at the press of her thumb in small, firm circles against his frenulum, his cock spasms and he shouts -- a ragged, fantastically urgent sound -- and pulls her so tightly against him she's nearly lifted off her feet.

She doesn't stop until the tremors wracking his powerful frame subside into small quivers, and her heels again touch the floor. Siebren holds onto her for what feels like a long time, and she lets him, dropping small kisses on his sinewy shoulders as his breathing evens out, and the heavy bass drum of his heart returns to its metronomic stability.

"Better?" she asks, smiling cat-like when he finally lifts his head to look at her.

His eyes are still a little unfocused, caught between the twisted strands of satisfaction and shame.

"I feel like some hormonal adolescent," he confesses, glancing down at his soiled trousers. "And you haven't..."

Moira shakes her head. "We've plenty of time for that. Check-out's not till eleven tomorrow morning."

He opens his mouth, possibly to protest -- if not his staying the night, then some evasive nonsense that while he might be in better condition than a majority of men half his age and younger, there are limits to what even the cleanest of lifestyles can accomplish when it comes to certain aspects of the aging process -- and Moira presses a finger to his lips with an order that he hold that thought.

She goes to her open suitcase and retrieves a dopp kit containing the usual toiletries, plus a few of her own design. It's one of the latter that she selects -- a small, unlabeled prescription bottle containing a dozen or so equally unmarked, golden capsules.

She shakes out two, swallows one with a sip of whiskey, and offers him the other.

"Here," she says.

Siebren looks skeptically at her outstretched hand.

"What is it?"

"Call it one of the benefits of my profession. --It's nothing mind-altering," she quickly adds. "It won't flag any drug test. It's not even a drug; more of a…vitamin, of sorts."

He shakes his head. "I don't think--"

"I know," she interrupts him, setting the capsule on the dubiously neutral ground of the still-made bed beside them. "It would be unconscionably reckless for you to accept, but I...like you, very much. I'm extraordinarily attracted to you, and I would like nothing more than to spend the rest of this evening with you, with or without pharmaceutical intervention. No strings -- theoretical or otherwise."

He smiles a little at the double-entendre, and, strangely, she finds herself blushing for the first time all night. A faint keen of warning ghosts the back of her mind, but she insulates herself against it; she is often so blunt, but rarely so honest, but now is not the time to examine his anomolous exception to that rule. Anyway, what she said was hardly worth burning herself at the stake of her own general paranoia: if he wants her for a few more hours, he'll stay, but if he doesn't, he strikes her as someone too gentlemanly, too _formal,_ to betray such a rashly intimate declaration -- a supposition that's all but confirmed by his reply.

"I appreciate the, er, _boldness_ of your disclosure," he says. "I would return the sentiment, but I believe my earlier enthusiasm made that…incontrovertibly clear." He pauses, opens his mouth, closes it, and then-- "I think I will take that drink, if you don't mind."

She pours two fingers of whiskey into a clean glass, and for a few moments, Siebren only stares down into the amber fluid, as if trying to divine from it some esoteric knowledge the way a spiritualist might read the leaves left behind in a cup of tea. When at last he does speak, it's not some ludicrous prognostication, or even a philosophical soliloquy, but rather a simple toast: "To reckless experimentation."

He plucks the capsule from the bed and downs it with a swallow of whiskey, grimacing slightly at the burn, and exhilaration flocks behind and beneath Moira's ribs, flutters hotly down to the convergence of her thighs.

"_Sláinte,_" she says, and when their drinks are set aside and her hands skate up the hard planes of his stomach and chest to link together around his neck, she promises that he won't regret it.


	2. Chapter 2

Siebren has been to the Moon and back, but he feels as though tonight has already launched him well beyond the frontier of his own experience.

He wasn't sure what to think of Moira O'Deorain when she propositioned him; even less sure what to think of himself, when he stepped into the elevator and pressed the button that would take him to her floor. The thought that he was a middle-aged cliché crossed his mind: the final nail newly driven into the coffin that's been housing his marriage for no doubt far longer than he ever realized, seeking consolation (and, perhaps, retribution) in the bed of an age-appropriate but still younger woman...and then that woman had proceeded to dismantle him with a precision so all-consuming as to replace every banal reality of the situation with an electrifying awe the likes of which he hadn't thought possible outside of either a symphony or a shuttle launch.

What he thinks of Moira O'Deorain now is that she cannot be of this world.

It's a preposterous thought, one beneath a man of his intellect and sagacity -- but then, she's beneath him, too, grinning and gasping, hips rocking in tandem with his as the comets of her hands streak across the sweat-slick sky of his back, trailing desire like tails of dust in their wake.

Moira's body is long and lithe, with an economy of flesh that borders on austerity, although she in no way appears gaunt or malnourished. Her skin is almost luminously pale, starred with freckles across her nose and her forearms and her shoulders; he's even found two on her toes, perfectly matched in color and placement, atop the fifth digit of each foot, and startled himself by placing a kiss upon each. He's never been particularly attracted to feet -- he's never been particularly attracted to any single aspect of women generally -- and so he must conclude that hers please him because they are hers; because there is no part of her that doesn't -- her hair, red as Martian soil and scented of rosemary; her teeth, sharp and white around her nimble, tender tongue; her uncommon eyes, and the prehensile cunning behind them, tickling his animal hindbrain with simultaneous frissons of intrigue and alarm.

Mere sex has never engaged him to this extent. She feels like an epiphany made flesh: that clear, bright understanding when the math finally yields its secrets -- one number, one notation, one expression at a time -- and the equation balances. It's like shaking hands with the universe; like making a covenant with the stars.

It's strange: his body has always been more of a machine to him than a conduit for profundity, something to be maintained for the benefit of his mind and the advancement of his research -- the physical rigors of space flight demand he be in peak condition -- and yet, under Moira's influence and that of whatever cocktail of chemical compounds she's given him, he feels tangibly cowled in the membrane of something cosmic and arcane. She claims it isn't a drug, and he's inclined to believe her. Whatever its classification -- vitamin, placebo, or potion -- it's certainly nothing so primitive as a cGMP inhibitor. It has all the major hallmarks of an empathogenic stimulant -- enhanced sensation and perception, increased energy, and a feeling of euphoria he can only describe as _suffusive_ \-- but he can detect no explicit variation between his current state and that to which she reduced him when she brought him off with one hand alone.

He simply…_wants_ her, expansively. Unendingly.

Siebren shakes his head, puzzled, but for the time being unconcerned by the whys and hows. He grasps her tightly by the waist and kneels back, drawing her with him, until her torso is bridged between his hips and the bed.

The change in Moira's demeanor is immediate, and he observes her reactions with the same greedy fascination that she did his. All the mischief in her expression is surpassed in two deep strokes by a beautiful tensity as the new angle stimulates her anterior fornix, and for a moment he's nearly undone by her body's accompanying rush of heat and slip as her arousal intensifies. He grits his teeth and forcibly wrests back his self-control, recalling with a mixture of hunger and humiliation his own burning helplessness during their initial encounter, and her uncanny ability to play his body like a harp, plucking out his pleasure as she saw fit. He wants so much to affect her as she affected him, to collapse the star of her composure into the same abyss of longing and release -- and it occurs to him that, first principles being what they are, she has perhaps already shown him how.

Sliding his right hand around to the small of her back to keep her suspended, Siebren moves to place the flat of his left against the lowermost section of her abdominals, just below her navel, and thumbs back the hood of her clitoris in tight, quick circles at the apex of her pudendal cleft.

What follows is a moment of pure Archimedean triumph: Moira's mouth falls open, and her eyes snap shut; she arches higher, panting, writhing, and reaches up to curl her fingers in the sheets beside her head. The low, rough timbre of her voice climbs the blissful octaves of passion unconstrained, her thighs tighten and tremble around his midsection, until with long, rapturous cry, her every muscle judders and quakes in ecstatic paroxysm.

It drags him over the precipice of his own completion, the entirety of his awareness eclipsed for the second time tonight by the volatile incandescence of orgasm.

Equilibrium returns slowly; for an indefinite number of moments, the only sound in the room is that of their exhalations -- quick, but calming by degrees.

Distantly, he feels her hands at his shoulders, grasping at him as if fearful he could float away. At present, such a thing doesn't feel as impossible as it surely must be, and so, not wanting to worry her, he leans forward, easing them both back down to Earth and the bed. He withdraws from her not without reluctance, and shifts with her onto his side, where he's relieved when he opens his eyes to find that her own are still closed.

She is so lovely, he thinks, the sensation of gazing at her not unlike that of looking back at the globe of the world through one of Horizon Lunar Colony's panoramic windows, a bright blue orb teeming with life, poised on the subtle edge between insignificance and infinity.

"God," she laughs, "my head is spinning."

He smiles and cranes his neck to kiss the glistening column of her throat, her jaw, her cheek, the lids of her mismatched eyes and, finally, her mouth.

Moira cups his face in her hands, crushing her lips to his and licking into him with zeal.

"You're incredible," he whispers when they part, and shivers when her nails ghost down his spine as she chuckles.

"Patent flattery. And the feeling is mutual." She hums a little moan of contentment, the hard buds of her nipples skimming his pectorals as she stretches languidly, luxuriously. "God, that was exactly what I needed."

Siebren's heart loses a beat in his chest. No, they just… He can't already be…

"What was in that pill?" he asks.

Moira blinks, but before she can explain, she feels the hardening twitch against her inner thigh, and her eyebrows lift in genuine surprise. Siebren tries to shift away from her, but their limbs are too securely hooked together, and all he can do is hunch into her chest, face reddening.

Moira tightens her embrace, but beyond that does nothing more than sedately run one hand up and down the length of his back, as if stroking the coat of a skittish horse. It's hypnotically soothing, and incrementally, the awkward coil in his muscles loosens and unwinds.

"It's not an aphrodisiac," she says after a few moments, "or a vasoconstrictor. Your feelings and responses to stimuli are your own. Its only physiological effect is an optimization of cellular efficiency. Biotics are employed mainly to heal acute, significant injury; all I've done is engineered a dilute, extended-release form of their mechanism of action. Initially I thought it could be utilized in the management of chronic conditions, or perhaps augment the remission of certain cancers, but its development was something of a serendipitous byproduct, not the main goal of my research, and so I put it on the back burner; then I lost my funding before I could fully explore its potential. In a healthy subject, its effects are as you're experiencing -- you just happen to be experiencing…well, _this._"

"_You,_" Siebren corrects her, and feels the puff of her wry laughter across his brow.

"Hmm, I wonder."

He's tempted to surrender to confirmation bias and claim that he doesn't wonder; he _knows_ \-- but even with his prefrontal cortex predominantly curtained off from the rest of his brain by the hormones and neurotransmitters instrumental to the biological arrangement of lust, the principles of rationality are too deeply ingrained within him to permit the utterance of so definitive a statement upon the results of a single sample.

"How long does it last?" he says instead.

"I don't know with any real level of certainty," she admits, rather brazenly. "A day or two, perhaps a week at the outside."

"And we have until eleven o'clock tomorrow morning."

"We do."

She runs her thumb and index finger along the helix of his left ear, and he lifts his face to kiss her, slow and deep, until she pushes gently at his chest, urging him to lie supine, and moves to seat herself atop his hips.

Again, then. _Godverdomme._

Swallowing dryly, Siebren slides his hands up the lengths of her thighs, over the modest flare of her hips and up her toned obliques, until his fingers settle into the grooves between her ribs. He brushes his thumbs over her small breasts, and feels her lungs fill beneath his palms, feels her heartbeat -- swift, but not yet racing.

She tilts his chin up with one finger, and he makes the effort to meet her gaze with his.

It's always been overwhelming to him, eye contact. He can sustain it for a few seconds at most with familiar acquaintances; among unknowns, scarcely at all. Moira spans the chasm between the two, a virtual stranger of whom he possesses intimate knowledge, and who possesses intimate knowledge of him in turn. Thus far, she has not questioned what others find to be his failings, and has conformed her approach to his idiosyncracies even as she's led him past the boundaries of what, if left to his own ungainly discomfiture in such matters, he might choose to do himself.

She is that rarest and most crucial of scientific implements, the fresh perspective, provocatively alien and uniquely thrilling to behold. He _likes_ looking at her. He can't imagine what she's thinking, but he trusts -- perhaps foolishly, but he trusts nonetheless -- that there is no part of himself he could reveal to her that she would view with disdain.

And so he looks, staring into the exquisite asymmetry of her eyes despite the static that haloes his mind at the action, disconnecting what access he has to eloquence and comprehension. But then, what could possibly be said here that cannot also be shown?

Seeming to come to the same conclusion, Moira smooths her hands over his brow, pushes his hair back against the grain as she leans down to kiss him, lightly trapping his erection between the lips of her vulva and his stomach, their mouths exchanging moans as she leisurely rolls her hips to drag her soft folds, still slick with their shared fluids from mere minutes ago, along his shaft in mimicry of the act itself. It's a feverishly obscene sensation, one that throws into stark relief the inherent baseness of sexual reproduction. All of humankind's technological advancements, its philosophic treatises, and still this messily viscous, primordial imperative remains foremost to their species' ability to flourish, like the degenerate matter that begets a nuclear fusion response in some incipient supernovae.

His hands follow the pathways of her ribs around to her narrow back, until his broad palms are cupped around her shoulder blades, and then slip down, fingers pressing at either side of the knobs of her spine. His thumbs dip into the divots formed at the small of her back by her iliac crests as he gets a firm grasp of her buttocks and lifts, and Moira, ever accommodating, takes his cock in one hand and aligns it with her entrance.

She sinks down on him slowly, centimeter by centimeter, warm and wet and perfectly snug, and for a handful of moments offers him nothing more than a few teasing constrictions of her pelvic floor.

Siebren inhales shakily, hands clenching, breathing through the impulse to thrust up into the heavenly pressure of her cunt. 

"The _state_ of you," Moira whispers, grinning at his obvious torment, and he would be mortified by what one could perceive as her condescension if she hadn't already made it abundantly clear to him that the transparency of his yearning only serves to further ignite her own -- a truth made evident by the sudden, involuntary pulse of her velvety walls around him. He's heard her accused of being borderline kleptomaniacal in regard to the liberties she takes in the name of her work, and yet here, like this, with him, it is her need to be needed that informs her actions. If she does have a god complex, which indeed she may, it is Abrahamic in nature, wherein the measure of faith freely given dictates the merit of the soul.

And she is merciful as well as vengeful, he thinks, as she sits back and at last begins to move, rotating her hips in slow, concentric circles. Her momentum builds gradually, a torturous climb from largo to andante to allegro, until she's rising and falling in briskly fluid motions, a pale moon pulling at a hidden tide.

She comes easily in this position -- three times, her rhythm falters as she clenches around him -- and while the law of diminishing returns renders each climax shorter than the last, their intensity is inversely proportional to their duration, if the depth of her shudders and increasingly breathless pitch of her cries are any indication. She's bowed over him, hands braced against the headboard and one of his shoulders, eyes closed and face tense as she chases her fifth of the evening when Siebren feels his third begin to bear down on him, gathering like the thunderhead of a rapidly approaching storm.

He tightens his hold on her waist and endeavors to delay the inevitable, wanting to wait for her, but the surge is too strong, she feels too good -- unspeakably good -- and the warning in the back of his teeth is submerged by a hitching, wordless groan as he curls up and brings her hips down hard against his own.

Moira hisses a breath through her teeth, her nails digging into his shoulder as she grinds down frantically against his pubic bone, until with a harsh sob of relief her body locks and shivers, and she crumples, gasping, against his chest.

For several moments, they simply lie there, spent of all but the ability to breathe, and even that much feels like a laborious undertaking. She's far from heavy, especially to him, but when she at last alights from his body to fall boneless onto her back beside him, he feels unmoored by the sudden absence of her weight, anxious in a way that provokes one of his hands to grope for one of hers. She holds it loosely, lacking the strength for anything else, but with their fingers reassuringly intertwined.

Thus tethered, he relaxes into the leaden satisfaction of afterglow, until his body reminds him that, with or without biotic supplementation, it is not a perpetual motion machine for which fuel is an optional ingredient.

"Moira," he begins, and she covers her eyes with her free hand.

"Sweet Mother of Divine God, am I going to have to sedate you?"

He laughs, somewhat abashedly, and hopes she's being hyperbolic. "No, I -- I was only going to ask if you're hungry? I've just realized, I'm famished."

"Oh." She sighs, and the hand drops again to her side. "Yes."

The after-hours room service menu is limited to cold offerings, and so Moira orders them both seasonal fruit plates and ham and cheese sandwiches on rye, and a large pitcher of mineral water. For the bellhop's sake, they don the complementary fluffy white bathrobes to be found in every halfway decent hotel closet, and she has their food wheeled out to the balcony, where a small table and plush square chairs await them. Siebren balances his weight on the balls of his feet at the switch between soft carpet and hard, cold concrete, keeping his heels as perpendicular to the ground as he can manage without actually making contact.

The stars appear few here, their old light no match for the skyglow that bubbles the city in a diffuse orange haze, but Moira's room is far enough up that the sounds of the street below are little more than indistinct white noise, easily tuned out, and Siebren muses, while they eat, on whether the cloud cover mightn't be a meagre echo of the view to be had from the interior of a nebula.

He tells her as much, when she asks him what he's thinking.

"Macrocosms and microcosms," she says.

"Scale invariance," he agrees, and from there they fall easily into a discussion of universality, and the system-level behaviors of embryonic cells as they reflect the accretion of globular clusters into nascent galaxies.

"One wonders if there isn't some form of black hole gene hiding somewhere in the rungs between the helices," he jests, but Moira's eyes grow distant at the suggestion in a way he's helpless to identify.

"Yes," she says softly. "One does wonder."

She's quiet for a time, staring into the shadows clustered in one corner of the balcony, and he's on the verge of asking if she's all right when she gets to her feet, and walks to the railing.

"Moira?" he asks.

She holds up two fingers for silence, like an idol in the act of blessing, and he rises and moves to stand a short distance behind her. She's whispering something under her breath, and for a moment he's reminded of nothing so much as a sorceress speaking incantations upon the battlements of some ancient fortress.

Equal parts curious and entranced, he tilts his head and edges cautiously closer, until he can sense the ambient heat of her body through their robes.

"That's why the results couldn't be replicated," he hears her say, "it's a xenophagic synthesis… It's--"

She whirls around suddenly, and he jumps when she does, startled to find him so near. He steadies them both with his hands at her elbows, and she smiles up at him -- beams, even, eyes shining with the dazzling thrill of discovery.

"_You,_" she brightly accuses, catching his face in her hands and rising up on her toes to kiss him repeatedly. "You marvelous--" kiss, "--magnificent--" kiss, "--_wonderful_ man!"

"You've thought of something," he states the obvious, flustered by the praise and the sympathetic excitement he feels at bearing witness to a breakthrough, like being privy to the first crack in a butterfly's cocoon.

"Yes," she laughs. "Yes, I've thought of something. Oh, but don't ask," she implores when he opens his mouth to do just that, "not now -- just--"

She tastes of figs and meridian fennel, and on instinct, he lifts and spins her, a gesture that feels less romantic than in some way essential to the moment, to the dizzying nature of the night as a whole, and for the first time since her tongue traced the seam of his lips only hours before, Siebren thinks of the unfleshed remains of his marriage -- not, as he'd previously considered it, a skeleton equation unto itself, lopsided and inelegant, but as one formula among many occupying the long list of his life's reactants -- a life to which this interlude is not the product, but the arrow in flight toward a substance yet to be ascertained.

Moira sways slightly when he sets her back on her feet, and he hugs her close to keep her upright. When she rests her brow against the joint where his collarbones converge, he finds that she's exactly tall enough for her head to tuck neatly under his chin.

Her breath steams against his chest, and when she looks up at him again, the light in her eyes is shaded by a heavy-lidded desire that stirs the reemergence of his own, and renders any threat of sedation obsolete.

All she says next is his name.

It's all that she needs to say.


	3. Chapter 3

Moira awakes in a strange tangle of sheets, and for the few seconds it takes lucidity to arrive, she believes she is alone, seeing neither Siebren's face nor feeling the hot press of his skin against her back. It's not until she tries to move and gets no further than a twitch of her limbs before she's reminded of the unconventional position in which they'd fallen asleep together: she on her back, and he crossways underneath her legs, curled on his side facing the foot of the bed, with an arm wrapped around one of her calves as a child would clutch a soft toy. He'd been running the pad of his thumb across the top of her foot, she remembers, back and forth, back and forth, and she'd drifted off in a state of almost meditative tranquility sometime just before dawn.

To say that he's exceeded her expectations would be an understatement; she'd damn near exceeded her own in keeping up with him. Thank goodness for happy accidents -- she doubts she'd be able to walk properly if not for her little concoction of nanites and nutrients assisting the recovery process. As it is, a certain amount of soreness still lingers, but it's delicious, in its way, the pleasant exhaustion of a task well and thoroughly performed.

They had sex twice more before finally showering, stripping off the much-abused duvet, and collapsing into bed. He'd even taken her right there, out on the balcony: untied their robes, picked her up, sat her on the railing, and slid inside of her before she could even think to question the very real imprudence of such an act -- and then he'd held her so securely, and moved so carefully, closely and sweetly that the juxtaposition of being twenty floors aloft with the inexplicable confidence that he would not, could not let her go had sent her tumbling over an altogether different edge within what had felt like seconds.

The memory alone is enough to breathe a fresh plume of heat through the floor of her stomach, and she reaches down to touch herself, cupping her hand over her cunt and pressing against the honeyed ache she's beginning to suspect won't recede until they do, from whatever carnal barycenter it is that's kept them no further than arm's length from one another since the moment she answered his knock up her door.

But recede they must. She has a flight to catch and, thanks to his cross-disciplinary perspective, the work waits. She may not have a proper laboratory at present, but there are still results to cross-check, and simulations she can run on her setup at home -- and he, he has to go and turn everything humanity thinks it knows about the way the universe functions on its head. Moira would never forgive him if he didn't. It would be an even greater betrayal than if he capitulated to his wife, were he to succumb to some starry-eyed, oxytocin-charged illusion that the past few hours have been anything other than an (admittedly very successful) exercise in sexual compatibility.

Still, she thinks she wouldn't mind seeing him again after he returns, in a year or so. She can already picture his stern countenance softening with astonishment as he recollects to her the instant he knew that he had done it -- that he had deciphered one of the most enduring enigmas of this or any other scientific age; that he had peered firsthand into the ineffable eye of God, and occasioned it to blink.

She can picture it so clearly, she doesn't even notice how little the practical details of his accomplishment factor into the fantasy -- how she's too focused on watching his reverence unfold to ask him what it was that he'd actually seen.

Beneath the bridge of her legs, Siebren shifts in his sleep, and Moira realizes she's been curling her toes, and in doing so, digging her heels into the top of his thigh.

She relaxes, but he settles only briefly before her left leg is extended, and her shin brought to his mouth for a kiss.

"Sorry," she murmurs. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"It's good," he says, his voice gruff from sleep and grammar slipping groggily toward Dutch. "How late is it?"

The weak light limning the blackout-curtained windows tells her only that it is, regretfully, morning, and so she stretches for her mobile on the bedside table, squinting at the too-bright display.

"Half-eight. We still have a couple of hours."

His only reply is a noncommittal hum, and for a few moments she thinks unconsciousness must have reclaimed him, until she feels the slow glide of his fingertips up and down the length of her calf, like a string musician scaling the neck of their instrument.

Brilliant, attentive, wonderful man.

She props herself up on her elbows as he twists onto his back and sits up. In the darkness of the room, his features are less distinct than his form, but she knows he's looking at her, knows it as surely as a compass needle seeks magnetic north. She feels his hand, first on her knee and then behind it, parting her legs as he maneuvers to sit between them, and she only notices that she's still touching herself when one of his hands comes to rest over hers.

It's not a movement meant to stop her, but Moira stills regardless -- not embarrassed at being caught, but curious as to what he'll do.

His fingertips twitch indecisively against her wrist. She hears him swallow and exhale in the gloom, and then the mattress dips with the redistribution of his weight as he kneels, and his lips and tongue brush hotly against the the inside of her left knee.

She wets her own lips in an unconscious echo of the action, and runs the nails of her free hand over his scalp when he repeats it in short intervals, up, and up, and up her thigh, until she at last feels his breath on the backs of her fingers. He kisses each of her knuckles in turn, the gesture almost courtly -- liturgical, even -- and when he lifts her hand to allow himself access, he sucks the taste of her off of her fingers, as if unwilling to let a single molecule go to waste, and interweaves his fingers with hers before finally lowering the soft, warm succulence of his mouth to her cunt.

Moira closes her eyes and lets her head fall back, her breath catching in her throat as her hips lift into the caress of their own volition. She's acutely sensitive in the wake of the night's activities, so much so she thinks she can feel every bud on the blade of his tongue as he laps at her in full, gentle strokes, pausing every few licks to bestow her inner thighs with another suctorial kiss or gentle scrape of teeth, while their joined hands squeeze and slacken in rhythmic unison.

It's delicate work, and he takes his time, assembling her pleasure piece by piece, as he would a ship in a bottle. She doesn't instruct him, but finds him an apt pupil nonetheless, his subtle changes in position and technique guided by her body's responses -- a minute jerk of her hips here, a hushed oath there. He learns that she prefers an indirect approach, with his tongue firm around her clit but featherlight upon it; learns where to press and stroke with his fingers inside her, steadfast and shallow, adding heat as his own breath hastens, adding motion -- not plunging into, but rocking with, suckling her soft and steady as he finds that sweet spot in his pacing, measured but relentless.

Moira's never been uptight about sex, most classical standards of femininity having avoided, by genetic chance, both her person and her psyche. By the time sex had been presented to her as a viable option, she was already well-versed in the defiant acceptance of her own singularity, which came with the secondary effect of transmuting any vestigial sense of juvenile shame into an unyielding pragmatism that refuses outright to suffer the same delusions of inadequacy that others so often lament can hinder their enjoyment. In all things, she's made it a habit to take what she wants from those willing to give it, without reservation or, usually, much difficulty.

Even so, it almost defies probability, how easy it is with him: like tapping into the current of a subterranean river she had only the vaguest idea coursed right beneath her feet. His touch is an undertow that tugs her effortlessly toward that spiraling vortex where clarity and oblivion double back on one another and collide, and she comes almost gently, trembling against his mouth, each nerve a small flame unto itself, guttering like votives in a bethel at the sigh of a seaside storm.

He doesn't stop until he's extracted every last kink of pleasure to be wrung from her body, and she pulls him up to taste her own flavor on his tongue, somewhere between saltwater and wine. His unsated need for her rests hotly against her thigh, and Moira reaches down with intent to grasp and guide him in.

"No," he breathes, heeling his hips back. "With…with your hands. --Please," he adds, mistaking her surprised pause for reluctance, and she draws him back down for a reassuring kiss and the comforting stroke of a hand down his spine, feeling him shiver, feeling his heart kick hard and fast against the sturdy wall of his back.

Wordlessly, she rolls them over, exchanging their relative positions to sit between his thighs, legs bent and feet resting flat at either side of his torso.

He flinches as Moira runs her fingers down his stomach, tracing over his well-defined abdominals and the deliciously deep inguinal crease demarcating the borders of his midsection and lower extremities.

"Ticklish?" she asks.

Siebren huffs a laugh. "A little."

Moira tilts her head, considering. "In that case," she says, "I recommend that you try your very best to hold still."

She feels him tense in anticipation, his hands wrapping preparatively around her calves, and waits two beats before beginning, as he did, at the inner thighs, lightly pressing her fingertips up along his groin before circling around the base of his cock lying heavily against his stomach. She makes no move to touch it just yet, choosing instead to push laterally toward his hips, and Siebren inhales a sharp breath through his nose, but manages to keep from flinching up again.

"Good," she praises, bringing her hands back to the medial line of his abdomen, around and down again. His chest rumbles with a quiet groan when she cups his testicles and rolls them gently, and his fingers flex against her calves in kind.

Moira bites her lip on a smile as she drags the flat of her free palm up the underside of his erection, amused by the way it twitches upward on the completion of every stroke, seeming to chase her touch. He really is an ideal specimen, long and thick, with a full, flushed head and only the slightest leftward curvature. She almost wishes he had asked for her mouth, despite fellatio ranking fairly low on her list of best-loved sexual acts.

Changing tack, Moira grips his cock firmly about the base with one hand, and lightly pinches the fingers of her other over his glans and pulls up, once, twice; on the third pass, she trades the whorled pads of her fingertips in favor of grazing him with her nails, drawing a hoarse gasp from his throat and a barely-restrained bucking of his hips.

"There, there," she coos.

When he appears to have gotten himself under control, she does it again, rewarded this time with a soft hiss and a brief flow of pre-ejaculate, which she spreads over the head of his cock with her thumb before scissoring her fingers around the coronal ridge and that delightfully innervated spot that unraveled him so completely the first time she touched him.

Siebren's muffled whimper reaches her ears in the same instant he stiffens, and Moira backs off slightly, braiding her fingers together and stroking him patiently with both hands until he relaxes, and then repeating the whole process anew, lingering a little longer on each step, again and again, until he's trembling with the effort not to writhe, and can't seem to decide whether to pant or hold his breath.

"_God, Moira, alsjeblieft… Alsje--_ Please, I can't," he begs, although of course he can -- he's on the very cusp of doing so. His feet are curling into the mattress beside her and his grip on her legs is tight enough to bruise, and Moira can't resist: she bends forward, wraps her lips around his perfect cock, and sucks him through the final seconds, loving the way he curses and jolts, loving the rough wrench of his fist in her hair -- not intended to push her down or even keep her still, but an unthinking imperative to simply _hold on_ as he swells and twitches against her swirling tongue, and the taste of him floods her mouth in a handful of sweetly metallic bursts.

When he has nothing more to give, she comes off him with a kiss to his tip and a satisfied smile, and Siebren laughs breathlessly, incredulously, as she crawls her way up his body and stretches out to lie on top of him with a positively feline air of entitled contentment.

"Good?" she asks, arching a brow, with her arms folded over his chest and her chin propped up on one wrist.

His large hands frame her face, and he cards his fingers back through her hair, and shakes his head.

"Incredible," he murmurs, extending his legs to twine them around hers. "_Je bent een heks._" 

Moira doesn't ask for a translation, sensing he would have said it in English if it was something he wanted her to understand, although his tone is enough to communicate its affectionate nature. His gray eyes are dark, almost purple in the low light -- dusky, she thinks; a liminal color for a liminal space. The sun is rising beyond this room, burning off a little more of the night's spell with every second that ticks past.

"We have to leave soon," she says softly, tracing one of his clavicles with her fingertip.

"Yes," he agrees, a resigned sigh stirring a few strands of her hair, and then laments with playful consternation, "Had I known all that awaited me last night, I would have stopped by my room first for a change of clothes."

Moira laughs. "Give me your key card; I'll fetch you a clean pair of trousers."

Siebren shakes his head. "That's really not necessary--"

"Nonsense, I insist. It was my fault, after all."

"Well, I wouldn't call it a _fault,_" he says, and he's actually smirking -- he, who could barely speak for stammering not twelve hours prior.

"You'd better not," she warns, cupping his sharp chin in one hand and running her thumb across his bottom lip, biting her own when he nips at the pad, swallowing when kisses her palm.

If she doesn't move now, they'll be here for another day -- an appealing prospect, to be sure, but a precarious one, a domino that neither of them can chance toppling into its neighboring tile.

She doesn't think her own weight has ever felt so heavy than when she untangles her legs from his and pushes herself off of him, and then, finally, out of bed and into the bathroom to brush her teeth, closing the door behind her not out of any real need for privacy, but a suspicion that if he follows her in, if she has to see him looming naked behind her in the mirror, watching his reflection watch hers, her resolve will crumble like a wet cake, and they'll be right back at square one again.

Clothes, she decides, spitting into the sink: the reestablishment of some form of barrier, no matter how flimsy, needs to be her primary concern.

He's facing away from her when she steps out, thankfully, sitting on the edge of the bed with his long arms folded over his head in a stretch, his strong pianist's hands gripping his triceps, and to her credit Moira allows herself to be only momentarily distracted by the smooth play of muscle shifting and bunching beneath skin, before she successfully reaches her suitcase.

She dresses quickly, casual for summer travel: loose drawstring trousers and cuffed blazer, a thin t-shirt, half-tucked, and yesterday's Chelsea boots, collecting herself a little more with each layer, until she feels she can approach him without too great a risk of their being peeled right back off again.

She takes his card, and he slips his hands beneath her blazer to hold her loosely at the hips, thumbs pressing across the prominent bones there. Moira rests her hands against the sides of his neck, as much to steady herself as it is a natural reciprocation of the contact.

"I like your shirt," Siebren says, and she glances down at the faded red-and-blue lightning bolt zigzagging its way down the well-worn white cotton.

"Do you?" she asks. "Are you a Bowie fan, then?"

He shrugs. "All astrophysicists are Bowie fans. They won't award you the doctorate if you can't recite all the words to _Ziggy Stardust_. Or _Lady Stardust_. Or _Starman_, _Blackstar_\--"

"--_Space Oddity_, _Hallo Spaceboy_…"

Siebren nods. "And you, of course," he says.

"Oh?"

"_The Prettiest Star_."

Moira winces and groans, but leans down to kiss him regardless. "You're a lad insane," she mutters, smiling despite herself. "I'll be back in a minute."

"I'll be here."

* * *

He's not quite sure what to do with himself in her absence. 

For a moment, it's like she took the air from the room with her, and he inhales deeply, as if to prove to himself she did not.

He should do something, he thinks, not just sit here with his mouth full of teeth, and so he makes his way to the bathroom to relieve himself and scrub his face with water. He helps himself to a swig of her mouthwash, and the thought occurs to him that this is what she tastes like, every morning.

It's followed by a hyperawareness that he is surrounded by the quotidian components of her life, or at least those she felt necessary to bring with her from…

Where is she from? Ireland, obviously, but is that where she lives?

Siebren pads across the room and checks the luggage tag on her suitcase, but while it lists a phone number, it's without an address, and the case itself lacks a label, being compact enough for carry-on. Perhaps she really is from Mars -- one of Ziggy's Spiders, he imagines, shaking his head with a smile.

He doesn't snoop through her things -- he's curious, not unprincipled -- but he does examine what's already on display: a couple of journals on mutation research, pharmacogenomics and molecular therapy, and a battered paperback copy of James Joyce's _Ulysses_.

It's a favorite of hers, he can tell -- the spine's a hairsbreadth from being broken, and the pages have been dogeared so many times that he has no way of knowing where in the voyage she's at in her current rereading. He'd once made an attempt at the book himself, upon the insistence of his much more literarily-inclined university roommate that Joyce was of paramount importance to preparing a young man for the real world, but Siebren's English hadn't been up to the nuances of a dialect twice removed, and he'd found the scarcity of commas distressing.

Still, he's familiar with the story's basic premise: an early twentieth century adaptation of Homer's _Odyssey_, with Odysseus' decade-long peregrinations between Troy and Ithaca transposed and condensed into the events of a single day.

A macrocosm in a microcosm.

And then a realization hits him, with meteoric intensity--

"_Ik ben niet verliefd,_" he tells himself.

No.

No, he is not in love.

He is not in love, because he is not the sort of man to whom love itself is attracted. He's not that sentimental, or poetic, or foolhardy, or spontaneous. In the fed up words of his wife, he has more space in his brain reserved for orbital revolutions than he does for anniversaries.

"_Ik ben niet verliefd, ik ben niet verliefd, ik ben niet verliefd…_"

Except, of course, that he is.

Abruptly and preposterously, but incontrovertibly so.

"_Ah God, Siebren, je hopeloos dwaas."_

He sets the book back down, and his anxiety gives way to a sudden rush of panic, of terrible, claustrophobic foreboding.

He presses his thumb and middle finger against his temples, tries to will it away.

Not now. Not now. She'll be back soon, and this _cannot happen_ now.

He really is a hopeless fool. He knows better, he should have anticipated that this particular neurological tripwire would be activated by the events of the past three days -- the crowd of the symposium, his wife's ultimatum, even Moira -- especially Moira. Positive feedback is still feedback, and his ability to process an overabundance of it without triggering an emotional runaway is finite and, more often than not, an exercise in futility.

"_Tyfuslijer._"

With shaking hands, he picks up one of the robes they'd discarded on the floor only a few hours prior, hastily pulls it on, and escapes to the balcony. The brightness doesn't help, but the open air does, and while the texture and temperature of the concrete bite unpleasantly, almost painfully, into the soles of his feet, it hardly matters at this point -- the bullet has already been fired at the church, and the only way out is through.

Were it not for Moira's imminent return, he'd give into the urge to pace in circles, but he's been informed on more than one occasion that doing so makes him look like a raving lunatic, and so he digs the heel of his palm into his sternum and tries to soothe himself with compression and breathing alone -- four counts in, eight counts out -- as he stares unseeingly at the grid of streets and avenues some twenty floors below.

Four in, eight out.

Four in, eight out.

Four in--

"_There_ you are."

Siebren cringes, his eyes squeezing shut, and swallows dryly.

"Sorry it took so long, but I popped down to the café in the lobby for electrolytes and caffeine. What are you... Are you all right?"

"_Ja,_" he forces out, his voice too loud to his own ears, and he can't look at her, _can't._ "--Yes. Yes it's good I'm. It will pass in a few minutes."

She says nothing at first, and Siebren implores the laws of probability that her silence means she's taken his assurance at face value, as she has so many other things, because nothing is worse than well-meaning questions at this point. He doesn't want to offend her, but this isn't something he can explain while it's happening.

"Come here."

Her palms are warm, her fingertips cold and wet, and he struggles not to recoil from the touch.

"No, I-- I-I'll be all right, I just--"

"_Come here,_ Siebren."

His jaw clenches in irritation, but he lets her lead him, with rigid steps, toward the nearest chair, and no sooner has she pushed him to sit down than she deposits herself sideways in his lap, wraps one arm around him as tightly as he suspects she's able, cradles his head against her chest with the other, and begins to rock him, back and forth, like a child.

She doesn't infantalize him any further -- doesn't hum or hush or coo; in fact she's blessedly quiet -- and he surrenders within moments regardless because _God,_ it helps; he could almost weep for how much it helps, the pressure and the motion working like a relief valve in reverse, collecting what's been scattered and bottling him back up, safe and soundless but for the dull resonance of her heartbeat against his ear, and the cadential susurration of fabric as they move.

_Witch,_ he thinks, burrowing deeper into the warmth of her, the nonjudgmental haven of her slender limbs. Magical woman. She's a witch, and he's in love.

"You smell like me," he says, once complete sentences have returned to the radius of his grasp -- a ridiculous observation, but the first one that filters through the fine ataraxic mesh now overlying his cognitive faculties.

Her laughter feels like a purr against his ear.

"Indeed," she agrees. "I'm wearing your cologne, too."

Oh. _Oh._

There's an animalistic eroticism inherent in both admissions that he hadn't previously considered, and an uncharacteristic wave of possessive pride crests somewhere around his solar plexus.

How does she do that? How does she render his dignity irrelevant one moment and then pay tribute to it the next, without seeming herself to differentiate between the two? He can't make heads or tails of her personality, other than its capacity and willingness to adapt to his -- if she's adapting at all.

It's a terrifying thought, that she may simply be his complement -- his equal and his opposite, who defies explanation, and demands none in return.

Siebren tilts his head up to brush his lips against the underside of her jaw.

"Thank you," he says quietly.

"For the pleasant olfactory experience?"

"For being so…decent, about this."

"It's fine. You were overloaded, that's all. It was a stimulating night; it happens."

She's switched from rocking to petting him again, maintaining rhythmic contact in the same long, downward strokes one might use to caress a cat, or a rabbit.

"How did you know?" he asks.

Moira inhales, thinking, her breast rising against his cheek. "You're very all or nothing in regard to what interests you, but you don't subscribe to moral absolutes. You're hypersensitive, physically. And it did take you half an hour to notice what colors my eyes are."

Siebren barks a hollow laugh. "And here I thought I was being subtle."

"You are subtle. I like to think I had exceptional evidence from which to make my deduction."

"I hope that's true. Only a handful of people are aware that I'm…less neurotypical than advertised. The ESA isn't in the habit of entrusting billions of dollars worth of highly calibrated equipment to people prone to meltdowns, even if said people helped to design it. Not only that, but if I were ever formally diagnosed, they could no longer legally allow me near the controls of anything with wings that wasn't also bolted to the ground.

"Believe me," he stresses, "if I thought, even remotely, that my condition made me a danger to myself or anyone else, I would agree with them, but I _know_ my own mind -- my work is the furthest thing from what sets it off. If anything, it's mitigative. Like music."

"Well then," Moira says lightly. "Your secret's safe with me."

"I feel like all of me is safe with you."

He feels her heart begin to race as soon as the outburst is exposed to air, and regrets it immediately.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have… You said no…no strings."

"No strings," she echoes, the words bouncing hollow off the roof of her mouth. "But…"

Her lungs shiver with her sigh, and Siebren moves to look at her for the first time since her return, but his eyes have barely lifted before her mouth falls against his with a fervor that saps him of what fragile strength he'd managed to scrape together against the way he feels about her.

If this isn't a conclusion, he thinks, then neither can it end here.

He cannot allow it to end here.

"A loop," he gasps against her lips, and she pulls back, breathless, her eyes searching his face in the same confusion of desire and disarray that he knows is reflected in his own.

"What?" she asks.

"No strings, but a -- a quantum loop. Meet me here again, one year from yesterday, at the bar downstairs. It's-- It's a long time, I know, but--"

"Yes."

He blinks. "Yes?"

She nods. "Yes. I'll be here."

He scarcely has time to smile before her mouth returns to his, and she clambers off of him, pulling him up and back inside the room, somehow still kissing him all the while.

"Quickly," she hisses, fingers fumbling at the sash of his robe, "quickly…"

They unravel only what's necessary, two knots and a sharp tug of fabric to one side, and the instant the way is clear Siebren grasps her by the backs of her thighs and hoists her up against the nearest wall.

It's rough and erratic -- dissonant, even, but divinely so. Their teeth click on every other kiss, and the squeeze of her legs around his torso almost prohibits him from moving at all, but it's enough, it's perfect; _she's_ perfect, and when she comes apart around him with her nails in his back and his name on her tongue, he's helpless not to follow, burying his face in the crook of her neck as he gives himself over to the freefall.

* * *

Moira is five minutes late checking out. She suspects Siebren will be at least fifteen.

A day ago, she expected to be departing this place a hungover wreck of sickly determined fury, and she rather looks it anyhow -- glassy-eyed, hair mussed and clothes wrinkled, sipping on a coconut water cold brew as she scrawls her name on the signature pad in front of an irksomely smug-looking desk clerk.

The only aspect of her appearance that suggests otherwise is her mouth, quirked up at the corners in a tiny, anticipatory smile that simply will not go away.

She has so much to look forward to.

"Will you be requiring a shuttle service to the airport?" asks the clerk.

"Yes, please," she says, and then heads outside to wait as he makes the arrangements on his touchscreen.

The hotel must have a pool of drivers on standby, because a nondescript car pulls up to the curb not a minute later, and out of it steps, of all things, an honest-to-God cowboy, complete with hat, obnoxious belt buckle, and spurs.

"O'Deorain?" he asks. His accent is almost aggressively American, and Moira wonders if it's part of the costume. He gestures at his vehicle and says, "I'm your ride."

Oh, well, she supposes; it's a fittingly bizarre finish to the surreality of the morning in general.

He puts her suitcase in the trunk while she slides into the back seat. Had her mind not still been so loudly buzzing with the shock of Dr. de Kuiper's -- for he must be Dr. de Kuiper to her again, at least for the next 364 days, because she is not going to be mooning over him like a schoolgirl in the meantime, she's _not_ \-- the shock of his compromise, and moreover, her own unhesitating assent to it, she might have taken note of the dark tint applied to the car's windows, and not been quite so surprised at the presence of a second man already occupying the seat furthest from her door.

She hesitates, one foot still on the pavement, the fine hairs at the back of her neck standing on end.

"What is this?" she demands.

The man glances at her, and rolls his eyes. "Ride-sharing," he says, looking none too pleased at the development himself. "One of the shuttle companies is on strike, or some bullshit. Anything for a few extra pennies on the dollar, am I right?"

Another American. Brilliant.

"Quite," she says, and closes her door when the cowboy settles himself back in the driver's seat with a drawling "Y'all ready?"

"All set, Jesse," says the man beside her, and she frowns as they pull away from the curb.

"You know him?" she asks.

He shrugs. "I own him."

"Fuck you," the cowboy says casually from the front, and Moira's trepidation returns full force.

She glances at her door -- there's no inside lock, like a police unit.

"Really, now," she says, keeping her voice as hard and even as she's able, "what -- _the fuck_ \-- is this?"

The cowboy -- Jesse -- looks briefly at her in the rearview mirror, eyes unreadable, while the man beside her turns to face her with a smile that's all the more chilling for how pleasant it is, as though he's taking a little sun on the quarterdeck of some internal ship.

"Doctor Moira O'Deorain," he says, "my name is Gabriel Reyes, and I have a great deal to discuss with you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. That's that, then. Thank you so much to everyone who's read and commented and kudoed, and generally watered the weed that is my desire to Make People Feel Things and Communicate My Vision. /monocled pretension
> 
> And on that note... Anybody interested in a less explicit but longer and considerably angstier canon-era sequel? Asking for a friend. o_o


End file.
